Sarah Harte: Negative stereotyping inherited from the past is hard to eradicate

How to solve the problem of finding people for a project without inadvertently conveying the message that we want people to fill a quota for their skin colour?

Vivien Leigh in character as Scarlett O’Hara, left, and Hattie McDaniel as Mammy, in Gone with the Wind.

Race has sprung up like a geyser on my radar in the last month in different guises. On the Left Bank in Paris, I went for drinks with Zoomers in their mid-twenties which included two Irish men, one Columbian woman, and two American women, one Jamaican American, the other of Polish extraction and Jewish. I discovered one of the Americans was Jewish after I launched into a rant about Gaza. Cue some backpedalling to make her feel more comfortable.

The big-ticket topics for discussion included race and racism, and Ireland’s history as a colonised country. The Lebanese bar manager got in on the act by breezily contributing that he despised colonialism of any sort, therefore loved the Irish, and disliked Americans, although he assured the black American woman that she got a pass because she was black. The white American woman presumably sucked it up as she pondered how she was being served by an anti-American and possibly in the company of an antisemitic (she wasn’t).